Mondino dei Lucci

Mondino (a diminutive for Raimondo; Mundinus) dei Lucci.

Anatomist, b. probably at Bologna, about 1275; d. there, about 1327. Mondino performed a series of public dissections at the University of Bologna in the early part of the fourteenth century. He is sometimes said to have performed only two or three dissections, but his own writings refute this. He is often proclaimed the first to have performed dissections in modern times, but Haeser says that many anatomists dissected before his time, and that we have even a manual of dissection written before this, by one Ricardus. Mondino systematized dissection, and wrote a manual called "Anathomia", which was used in nearly all medical schools for three centuries after his time. Its popularity can be judged from the editions issued after the invention of printing. There is one at Pavia (1478), Bologna (1482), and Padua (1484); there are Venice editions of 1494, 1498, 1500, and 1507; Leipzig (1505), Strasburg (1509), and Marburg and Lyons shortly afterwards. His book was considered such an authority that an old teacher declared that medical students for centuries worshiped him as a god. If something found in a dissection were not described in Mondino's "Anathomia", constantly open before them while dissecting, it was considered an anomaly. The work of course has been superseded by progress in the science of anatomy, but it is easy to understand from it how much practical anatomy for surgical purposes the medieval physicians were taught.

More Encyclopedia

The Catholic Encyclopedia is the most comprehensive resource on Catholic teaching, history, and information ever gathered in all of human history. This easy-to-search online version was originally printed between 1907 and 1912 in fifteen hard copy volumes.

Designed to present its readers with the full body of Catholic teaching, the Encyclopedia contains not only precise statements of what the Church has defined, but also an impartial record of different views of acknowledged authority on all disputed questions, national, political or factional. In the determination of the truth the most recent and acknowledged scientific methods are employed, and the results of the latest research in theology, philosophy, history, apologetics, archaeology, and other sciences are given careful consideration.

No one who is interested in human history, past and present, can ignore the Catholic Church, either as an institution which has been the central figure in the civilized world for nearly two thousand years, decisively affecting its destinies, religious, literary, scientific, social and political, or as an existing power whose influence and activity extend to every part of the globe. In the past century the Church has grown both extensively and intensively among English-speaking peoples. Their living interests demand that they should have the means of informing themselves about this vast institution, which, whether they are Catholics or not, affects their fortunes and their destiny.